Free Notorious by Roberta Lowing

says, ‘You can pay me in wheat flour.’
    I look at her helplessly.
    She points at my watch. ‘You pay me with that.’
    I instinctively cover my watch with my left hand, as though she could levitate it off my wrist. ‘I need information about the woman in the sick bay.’ I add hastily, ‘The truth.’
    ‘My fortunes are the truth.’ She sits, cross-legged, the flames on her heels merging with the red-sand colours of her skirt.
    ‘I don’t think you know anything to help me,’ I say.
    She rolls up the blanket. Her bangles clank, muted and resentful. ‘The Nazarene talked in her sleep.’
    ‘I need more than babblings.’
    She gathers the blanket and rises gracefully onto her toes, stretching, and stands, flat-footed and flat-backed.
    She says, ‘I carry your heart with me. I carry it in my heart.’
    I give her the watch.
    ‘My name is Meersun,’ the woman says, sliding the watch into a pocket in her skirt and squatting on the stone floor.
    ‘I won’t weary you with my story . . . ’ Here she shoots me a sly look as though she senses my lack of interest. ‘Enough to say that my mother Betsoul suffered horribly at the hands of the Nazarenes. My grandfather cast me out when I refused to marry the man he chose for me. A man who had already beaten two wives to death’ – her voice rises indignantly – ‘who took little boys into back alleyways. Women are for babies, he would say to me. Men are for fun. A soldier, of course.
    ‘Sister Antony took me in. She owed me a great deal.’ She raises her broad palms. ‘No-one can operate the rollers in the laundry as well as I can.’
    I wait. She gives me another sly look. ‘Your woman said you found her when she had left her home.’
    ‘So she remembers.’
    Meersun takes the watch out of her pocket, holds it to the light, turning it this way and that so the glass face becomes a bright disc in the room.
    She says, ‘I had to sit with her. Even Sister Antony must rest sometimes. I think she is angry God does not give her energy to work day and night.’ She slips the watch on, up to her forearm, admiring it. ‘The woman told me lots of things. True things.’
    The thudding is back in my ears. ‘Only I can judge what is true.’
    Meersun comes towards me. I hear the swish of her skirts, the slap of her feet on the stone.
    She says, ‘The woman didn’t look at mirrors but watched herself in bowls of water she shook, to make ripples. Then she drew herself like that.’ She waggles her tattooed hand so the inked flames shift and blur before my eyes.
    ‘Distorted,’ I say, turning.
    Meersun says, ‘I think she made the scorpion bite her, so she looked like what she saw in the shaking water.’
    A cloying musky smell comes off her as she stands behind me. Metal rattles and pauses, rattles and pauses. She is tossing the watch up and down in her palm.
    ‘I like this watch,’ she says. ‘Do you have another?’
    ‘No,’ I say. The thudding is louder. There are specks in front of my eyes. I rub them angrily.
    The musky smell is more intense. She whispers, ‘No-one else knows this.’ She is right behind me. ‘The woman told me you killed her husband.’
    The thudding is louder. Closer.
    ‘That’s a lie,’ I shout, turning so fast that my elbow catches her shoulder. She backs away. ‘You’re lying.’
    Meersun stares past me. I hold out my hand. ‘She wouldn’t have said that.’ But I think, Would she? I raise my voice over the increasing noise. ‘Give me the watch back.’
    My words disappear in the roar that sweeps over the Asylum. A black helicopter swoops past the window. It rears upwards, out of sight, the noise wrenched away.
    That bastard Mitch. He had no intention of waiting for me to find something.
    I push past Meersun and shove the laptop in the briefcase. My hand touches the gun and I wonder whether it is just Mitch and the pilot.
    I head for the stairs. Meersun catches my arm.
    ‘You’ll never prove it,’ I say as I pull away.
    She